CONNECTICUT OPINION

CONNECTICUT OPINION; They Are Stardust. They Are Golden. They Are Boring.

By Mike McIntire; Mike McIntire lives in Southport.

Published: August 20, 1989

I AM 25 years old and my mother was at Woodstock. It's taken me more than a decade of self-therapy to overcome the initial shock and subsequent awkwardness that accompanied that revelation.

As the typical American teen-ager whose foremost mission was to establish independence from his parents, the knowledge that my mother had rocked to the same music I claimed as my own was devastating.

The upsetting news was imparted to me one day in 1978 when she walked into my bedroom, dust rag in hand, while I was blasting my first Who album.

I was in the ninth grade and had just discovered the Who and the other groups of the 60's, like the Doors and the Beatles. Playing air-guitar to the screams of Roger Daltry, I proudly waited to be yelled at for turning up the stereo too loud.

Instead, my mother stopped in the doorway, a strange glow of recognition and melancholy on her face. ''Is that the Who?'' she said, letting the dust rag slip from her fingers. ''I saw them at Woodstock.''

I was stunned. Parents weren't supposed to like their children's music, let alone go to a rock concert. They perked up over Frank Sinatra on some AM radio station or tapped their feet to Peggy Lee, but the Who? This was worse than the day it dawned on me that my mother and father had sex.

As the earth shifted under my feet, my mother cheerfully recounted how she had left me at my grandmother's and gone with some friends to upstate New York to see Joan Baez sing in a field. They had naively believed they could stay just for the Baez part, get a motel room and leave the next morning.

Of course on arrival they were swept into history, held captive for days in a wet and muddy celebration of peace and harmony, until the last riffs of Jimi Hendrix's ''Star-Spangled Banner'' hung in the air like ozone after a lightning storm.

After her revelation to me that day in 1978, my mother began to change. It was almost as if hearing the Who again had triggered long-dormant passions; my coming of age had somehow renewed a youthfulness in her that drew energy from that memorable weekend in a farmer's field almost 10 years before. She dieted, changed her hair, took up aerobics and became increasingly active in social causes.

And with the arrival of Woodstock's 10th anniversary the following year, she began telling everyone about her experiences there.

To my horror, she took a part-time job at my high school cafeteria, where, with her tales of the 60's and Woodstock, she became more popular with my peers than I was.

Friends whose parents were much older than mine would gape in wonder, or laugh, or express shock whenever it was revealed that, yes, Mike's mother had been at Woodstock. Her nostalgia became the bane of my adolescence.

Eventually I got over it. With the passing of its 10th anniversary, the subject of Woodstock faded, and as I became preoccupied with college, getting a job and moving out of the house, things I once thought important shrank in significance. My musical tastes broadened to encompass groups with names like INXS, the Replacements and R.E.M., which my mother could never hope to relate to. I had finally achieved independence.

A few weeks ago, she paid me a visit. Bubbling over with news, she herded me into my kitchen and pulled a large yellowed ticket from her purse. Looking at it, I felt a familiar tension worm through my stomach. The bold black print said: ''Woodstock Music & Arts Fair, Aug. 15-17, 1969.''

She proceeded to explain how it arrived in the mail several days earlier, part of a 20th anniversay commemoration that included finding all the original Woodstock ticket holders and sending them their tickets. Apparently, in the hoopla 20 years before, few people actually bothered to get tickets, which had sat in a vault somewhere ever since.

As my mother began a comfortable digression into the well-worn tales of her experience at Woodstock, my instincts wanted to remind her that I had heard it all before.

But as I struggled with a diplomatic approach, I suddenly felt a pang of guilt.

How could I deny her these memories, this woman who had clapped the loudest when I hit the ball in Little League, who went into debt putting me through college and who sent a man in a gorilla suit to my office on my 23d birthday?

So sitting down at the kitchen table, I listened as my mother told me again about that weekend 20 years ago.